Postpunk-Postdisco Fusion

In 1980, when I brought forth a comparable book about the '70s, I was
untroubled by such dark thoughts. Taking for granted the theoretically
depressing themes of fragmentation and the semipopular whilst thumbing
my nose at '60s crybabyism, I argued that the '70s were when the music
had come into its own: only after countercultural upheaval
could individual musicians buck rationalization's conformist tide to
create oeuvres and one-shots of spunk and substance in the belly of
the pop beast. It helped that I got off on the '70s more than most
rock and roll lifers--I thought Steely Dan and Lynyrd Skynyrd were
great bands then, and I still do--and it also helped that the future
looked bright. Just like some '70s-haters, I felt as if the punk
insurrection had been designed to my specifications, unpredictability
included. For all its antihippie rhetoric, punk meant to make
something of a not dissimilar cultural upheaval, only without the
'60s' icky, and fatal, softheadedness.

From this vantage I can see that my confidence was bolstered by a
consensus more sustaining than what I got out of Monterey or Woodstock
or Chicago '68 or the Mobilization or any number of excellent Grateful
Dead concerts. The core of this consensus was colleagues and
correspondents of shared yet far-flung musical enthusiasms, its body
and soul the cohort that materialized at any number of
punk-etc. gigs. On the one hand, an inferred community of music-lovers
cum discophiles; on the other, a lived-in community of music-lovers
cum night people. Predicated here on a shitload of discrete
sound-objects whose aesthetic was so legible you could build a canon
around it, there on a burgeoningly inchoate scene that didn't shrivel
up and die when the Sex Pistols quit on us. Predicated here on the
biz, there on bohemia.

For anybody who loved punk, 1980 was an exciting time, because punk's
flakstorm, christened postpunk in the twinkling of a convolution, was
still raging. Just like real revolutionary movements, punk was at its
best before the world got it down, but that doesn't mean its diffusion
into strictly musical issues was a perversion--a view now promulgated
by true believers as well as dilettantes who've gone on to better
things. Maybe John Rotten-Lydon hated rock and roll, but we loved the
stuff--and we were sure we understood it better than the keepers of
the pop machine. However, reduced our spiritual ambitions, the growing
legions of postpunk fans and postpunk musicians were fighting all
kinds of battles as the decade began--for airplay, for venues, for
viable business structures. And by any reasonable standard we won
those battles. Commercial radio is as reactionary as ever, but the
college variety gets more music to more people than Tom Donahue ever
dreamed. The painfully nurtured alternative club circuit is now so
taken for granted that every breach in its integrity is bewailed as an
attack on the natural order. And though the Record Industry
Association of America didn't know it, there were more records
available to the dedicated fan in the '80s than in the glut years of
the middle '70s--certainly more of spunk if not substance. No one can
know how many more only because no one sees all of them, not with the
engine of production a profusion of sporadically distributed
independent and import labels, many very specialized or local, for
whom a run of five thousand spells a hit.

In some sense these labels are still the biz, obviously. But it's just
as obvious that they aren't the same biz we assumed in postpunk's
early days. Even though we meant to retool the pop machine, we still
depended on it to belch out major music--Rumours and Rust
Never Sleeps and Dancer With Bruised Knees. Roxy Music and
Chic and Donna Summer. Though intergenerational aesthetic
comprehension was already eroding, the banal notion that the biz was
the root of all banality was not yet an article of faith, because the
biz was still where records came from. Young CBGBites may not have
thought Rumours was a better album than Talking Heads
77, or Some Girls a better album than This Year's
Model, but at least they recognized all four as competing
aesthetic objects--accepted the terms of the comparison. So when in
early 1979 I asked the gods of history for a fusion of the two
subcultural musics of the '70s, the smart punk then establishing a
commercial beachhead and the dumb disco then sopping up venture
capital, my petition was regarded as misguided, but not preposterous
by definition.

I'll say. All over the place, in the biz and bohemia and then unknown
scenes between, that's exactly what happened. Soon it became clear
that punk wasn't just an attitude with the lineaments of a
movement--it was also a rhythm onto which partisans projected an
attitude. Simple and unswinging, fast to frenetic, what John
Piccarella dubbed the "forcebeat" moved bodies in a way the Allman
Brothers--to choose the archetypal boogie band (and with two drummers,
too)--did not. And of course, so did a disco pulse that whatever its
polyrhythmic gestalt could also be pretty simple--a disco pulse that
at its most mechanical consisted of a kickdrum booming away 130 times
a minute. It wasn't at all preposterous to put them together into
"DOR" (for dance-oriented rock), and soon punk types were hotfooting
something slightly more elegant than the pogo. So even as the biz
withdrew its support from a disco subculture it had smothered half to
death, it began investing in various dancy punk offshoots from England
that eventually produced not just such fringe phenomena as industrial
and acid house, but the so-called New Pop and the so-called Second
British Invasion.

Except for a short-lived New York white-funk tendency, DOR action was
sporadic among U.S. bands, who soon adopted a broad orthodoxy--the
guitar-oriented garage aesthetic. But with a few hints from
transplanted Jamaicans (a crucial Britpunk inspiration, too), kids in
Harlem and the South Bronx had already put their own version of punk
attitude into effect. Aggressively minimalist, rejecting the pop
status quo and stripping music down to what they liked, the early
rappers responded to pretty much the same sense of simultaneous
surfeit and constriction that their white counterparts downtown
couldn't stand, and in pretty much the same way. The big difference
was that they didn't have the luxury of regarding their music as a way
out --instead, they tried to make it a way in. And though it took
years--live rap began around the same time as live punk, but the first
rap record wasn't released until 1979, and not until 1984 were there
rap albums in any quantity--that's what it became.

As I write, many pop savants are arguing that disco ended up changing
rock and roll more than punk, but this theory is just a provocative
way of deflating conventional wisdom. Disco sure didn't change
rock more than punk did--rock as opposed to rock and roll, the
artistically self-conscious music that made the critical analysis of
rock and roll inevitable. Long ago I defined "rock" as "all music
deriving primarily from the energy and influence of the Beatles--and
maybe Bob Dylan, and maybe you should stick pretensions in there
someplace." Now I would have to add, "only that stuff has gotten old,
so these days I spend most of my time on music deriving primarily from
the energy and influence of the Sex Pistols--and maybe Talking Heads,
and maybe you should stick, er, postpretensions in there someplace."
Because insofar as rock and roll is an object of critical
scrutiny--and you'd best believe this tome is full of crit--the '80s
belonged to postpunk.

Though punk's program failed on both sides of the Atlantic, its
adherents made up in commitment what they lacked in numbers, setting
off a countertradition of deep-to-compulsive change. As producers,
they founded the alternative biz and infiltrated all aspects of the
established biz; as consumers, they supported a retail network
designed to adapt. They seized college radio and helped define
import-oriented disco record pools. They were among the first white
people to take rap seriously or to think rap was fun; they identified
with styles from foreign lands. In old fart mode, postpunk zealots
proved even more self-righteous than diehard hippies, howling with
rage when anyone pointed out that hip hop was taking on the world
while indie rock ate its own tail. And there had always been a disco
version of all this alternative action--often the original
version. But at its best postpunk was open in a way disco wasn't:
CBGBites got into Chic more readily than Fun House regulars got into
the Ramones, and liked African dance music more than most dancers. And
because indie-rockers weren't so hungry for a way in, their
independence was more principled. When parental-warning stickers
became an issue, for instance, dance labels favored accommodating
censorship forces. Rock indies resisted.

Good for them--they had right on their side. But note that the rock
labels had less to lose by not compromising--except perhaps for a few
metal specialists, they had little interest in or hope of reaching the
kind of audience serviced by the chain stores and rack jobbers
demanding the warnings. Having learned to make their margin by selling
to the converted in specialty shops, indie rock had given up on what's
construed as the "mass" audience. And by and large the product
reflected this--even when it was really good (as opposed to pretty
good, which was far more common), it had no reach. Dance/rap music, on
the other hand, was something of a national sensation by decade's end,
and while it would be foolish to go on about the nobility of its
manufacturers--profit was without doubt their first consideration--it
would be cynical to dismiss their aesthetic principles, or to deny
that their music did as much as indie rock to keep its audience alive
and kicking, maybe even thinking. It wasn't only money they'd be
sacrificing if they were banned from the malls. It was impact. They
liked having impact. Who wouldn't?